As One Under the Law

P.J. O’Rourke

I first read P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious political screed Parliament of Whores in 1991, aged seventeen, and frequently didn't grasp what I was reading. Oh, I got O’Rourke’s unsubtle jabs at George H.W. Bush’s frequent ineloquence, his dismissive attitude toward bureaucracy, his open derision at how elected officials often mistake parliamentary log-rolling for work. But repeatedly, O’Rourke uses subtext I completely missed, often lacked the vocabulary to understand until years later.

O’Rourke’s chapter on American drug policy, for instance, features him joining a Washington, DC, police patrol on a narcotics sweep. The operation nets a camera-friendly arrest, O’Rourke writes, but the suspect was strictly nickel-and-dime. The arrest did nothing about the underlying condition. Frustrated, O’Rourke, an economic libertarian, questions a police officer whether cracking down on drugs has accomplished anything worthwhile. Would legalization maybe make better economic and strategic sense?

The policeman pointed to the crowd on the other side of the windshield [on a chilly DC midnight]. “We’re talking scum here,” he said. “Air should be illegal if they breathe it.” (115)

As a good Republican teenager and certified graduate of Nancy Reagan’s many in-school Just Say No campaigns, I completely misread that exchange. I assumed the officer meant that drug users, having dirtied themselves, subsequently dirtied everything they touched, and they needed removed from society before their pollution became widespread and intractable. On a conscious level, maybe that policeman even believed that, maybe. Humans can convince ourselves of anything.

But O’Rourke, an ex-hippie and antiwar activist before finding Jesus and the Republican Party in adulthood, probably meant something different. Given the time and place, “the crowd” milling aimlessly “on the other side of the windshield” was probably mainly or completely Black. O’Rourke, fearful of needlessly racializing things, probably took the “colorblind” approach beloved of White people everywhere, and omitted any mention of complexion, assuming his world-wise readers would know.

Michelle Alexander

The drugs O’Rourke’s ride-along buddies busted were mainly crack. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander has written, the crack “epidemic” and the Reagan Administration’s draconian response hit America just as the last dregs of manufacturing—one of the few employment fields available to Black men without diplomas—was leaving American cities. Many African Americans faced the social uncertainty of leaving home to pursue work, or the economic uncertainty of staying put.

Many Black Americans turned to crack, not because of any underlying moral failure (Nancy Reagan’s rhetoric notwithstanding), but because there was nothing else. But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 disproportionately targeted crack over powdered cocaine, despite crack being cheaper and less concentrated. As O’Rourke mentions elsewhere in his book, President Bush the Elder used his Oval Office pulpit to inveigh against crack’s evils in terms that were unambiguously racial.

When that unidentified policeman said “Air should be illegal if they breathe it,” he didn’t mean damaged people damaged the air. He meant The Other is inherently criminal, so anything The Other did should be automatically criminalized. I didn’t understand this until well into my thirties, and feel ashamed admitting that, but American justice presupposes that some people are inherently criminal, and passes laws to make this status enforceable.

Not only drugs, though. As Matt Taibbi writes, entire categories of law exist that White people mostly never know about. Anti-loitering laws, invented in New England to prevent Native Americans from lingering in White settlements, now get deployed mostly against Black and Brown Americans (and the occasional White trash), often on demonstrably specious grounds. Black Americans are way more likely to face rinky-dink traffic stops than honkies like me.

Matt Taibbi

Like millions of suburban White kids, I grew up never understanding these facts. I assumed, because that’s what 11th-grade American Civics taught me, that legislatures identified problems, like disorder and violence, and passed laws consummately. I was well into adulthood before I realized our laws create our definitions of crime and disorder. And our definitions inevitably serve to calcify our lopsided and frequently racist definitions of good and bad people.

O’Rourke, a libertarian Republican, tried to warn me thirty years ago. But because he used polite, White-friendly language, I missed the significance. And because I, individually, didn’t see the injustice being perpetrated, I made elaborate excuses why it didn’t exist, or anyway wasn’t important enough to care about. Only with the weight of years did I understand the unspoken suppositions underlying American justice. In the meantime, I became complicit.

That’s why, no matter how “not racist” anybody is, our opinions don’t matter. Because the law definitely is racist, and we’re under it.

The Long Walk Out of Home

Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing: Essays

Lauren Hough has spent her life walking away from toxic situations. Like malicious compliance in the U.S. Air Force, for instance, or the smiling malignancy of Washington, DC’s once-thriving gay community. Even being born into a notorious sex cult fades into the background of a life defined by violence and resistance. So much so that we’re almost halfway through her story before she even addresses the topic in depth.

In eleven autobiographical essays, Hough breaks down a life defined by escaping the violence. But she doesn’t address her story chronologically; she prefers to go thematically, starting with her Air Force stint. She followed the rules scrupulously, adopted military culture, and tried going along to get along. Yet her fellow airmen made her hitch a continual torture, as despite her efforts, she couldn’t conceal her main outsider characteristic: her homosexuality.

Hough spent her first quarter-century passing through environments where, as a woman, she existed for men’s comfort and convenience. Growing up in the infamous Children of God, she was taught that as a woman she existed, body and soul, for men’s pleasure. Except from an early stage, she knew men didn’t interest her. Oh, like many lesbians from “good” religious backgrounds, Hough tried to fool herself. It didn’t work.

The cult that raised her has changed names multiple times, but Hough describes it under its most famous name: the Children of God. Though Christian and Pentecostal in foundation, it turned bizarre when the founder began issuing messianic prophecies. You probably know the Children of God for its libertine sexual practices and accusations of child abuse. Hough’s telling, however, emphasizes its apocalyptic doomsday theology.

It took multiple attempts for Hough’s mother to successfully smuggle Hough out, an attempt only partially successful, as she left Hough’s father and two older sisters behind. But they escaped to another version of Hell: north Texas. Where the Children of God encouraged sexual profligacy, Amarillo’s dominant Christian denomination encouraged sexual repression, and shared the Children’s apocalyptic worldview. Hough soon realized she’d bounced from one cult to another.

Lauren Hough

So at the first opportunity, Hough dropped everything and joined the Air Force. (Hough is approximately my age, and joined the USAF around the time I tried to join the Corps, so I appreciate the unstated dedication required for that means of escape.) Once there, though, she found the Force used social programming techniques almost identical to those used in her cult, for almost exactly the same purposes.

Brief reminder: Hough doesn’t tell her story sequentially. I synopsize this way as a useful thumbnail. Instead, Hough introduces readers to the themes which will dominate her telling: the deadpan humor she uses to describe an increasingly awful campaign to break her spirit and make her compliant. She finds this campaign present throughout American life, military and civilian alike, religious and secular. To hough, deeply programmed compliance is everywhere.

This campaign takes some pretty awful turns. Hough describes some pretty awful personal violence, efforts that, cumulatively, probably count as torture. She describes everyone dogpiling some pretty horrific treatment upon her; readers of a sensitive disposition should approach this book with caution. Because although she maintains her wry humor throughout, Hough never flinches from telling us the more harrowing aspects of the torments she endured.

Moreover, thought she keeps thinking she’s escaped from organized, systemic torture, she keeps finding it scattered throughout American society. Ultimately outed and removed from the military, she crash-lands in DC’s formerly thriving gay community. But for all its vaunted bohemian luster, she finds the same forced compliance. So Hough does the unthinkable: she gets a regular job, only to discover that capitalism has the same cult atmosphere.

I already anticipate outsiders’ criticism: because she grew up in a cult, Hough sees everything in cult terms. After all, if you only have a hammer… And I can’t disagree with this assessment, since Hough sees everything through one lens. Life is more complex than that. But even as Hough probably doesn’t see reality with enough nuance to satisfy everybody, she presents a necessary alternate way for us to see.

Someone once said that only the completely personal is truly universal. Hough evidently agrees. Throughout most of this book, she focuses on her unique experience; only in her final pages does she turn her gaze outward and examine broader society. But ultimately she does say she’s writing about us. About the enforced roles we’ve accepted, and the tortures we take for granted. And she reminds us: we, too, can leave.

Belief, Unbelief, and Disbelief

I don’t believe in gravity. Yes, I realize that if I drop my sandwich, it’ll splatter all over my shoes; but that doesn’t require my assent to happen. Equally important, if I refuse my assent, if I actively disbelieve in gravity, my disbelief won’t influence the outcome. My willingness to grant intellectual credence to gravity doesn’t change that rain falls downwards, that planets orbit stars in predictable patterns, and that gravity is constant and calculable.

Right-wing media generation has recently turned heavily toward propagating politics based on “belief,” as in this image. One could make spirited arguments about what “belongs” means regarding Hilary Clinton’s legal culpability, Joe Biden’s health, or Donald Trump’s probity to lead. But this image short-circuits all such arguments by removing them from the domain of evidence, and redefining them as “beliefs.” Nothing has to have truth value anymore, or meet legal definitions; “belief” alone is sufficient.

This isn’t new. Over two years ago, Dr. Ibram Kendi wrote that then-President Donald Trump used “belief” language to exempt himself from evidence-based discussions. Faced with evidence that Earth’s climate is disastrously warming, a conclusion which faces almost no scientific dispute, or that police demonstrably use force against Black Americans disproportionately, Trump responded equally: “No. No. I don’t believe it.” Facts didn’t matter, only his individual belief. Reality, in Trumplandia, required the executive’s personal assent.

Unfortunately for this approach, evidence contradicts belief. Even as the former President vocally disbelieved in global warming or systemic racism, our 24-hour news cycle bombarded us with images of forest fires, withering droughts, crippling economic inequality, and police standing on Black Americans’ throats. Like my hypothetical sandwich, scattered all over my previously shiny Reeboks, this evidence proved that racism and global warming, like gravity, is real, whether I give it my intellectual assent or not.

That’s the problem with belief. We believe when there’s an absence of evidence: we believe that there is, or isn’t, a God, for instance. I find the idea of a sublime and transcendent organizing intelligence more persuasive than the Law of Very Large Numbers. But by definition I don’t know, and neither do you. Sometimes we believe despite evidence: I believe democracy is better than tyranny, but arch-segregationist George Wallace was democratically elected, so… meh.

Perhaps it helps to think religiously. “Faith,” the apostle Paul (or whoever) wrote, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This means belief in a transcendent source of justice which will repay loyalty someday. But one needn’t have religion to understand this; people with no hope of transcendence believe religiously in concepts like liberty, fairness, and art. We disagree on what these truths mean, but we believe in them.

We don’t, repeat don’t, “believe” facts. Objective, measurable reality isn’t contingent upon our assent: I don’t believe in maps, for instance, I simply trust their authority. Likewise, I have strong opinions about science and technology, but I don’t believe in them, I simply acknowledge that skilled professionals have tested them. Certainly scientists, cartographers, and other experts are sometimes wrong. But experienced critics test their beliefs constantly, ensuring false facts are purged, regardless of others’ beliefs.

We’re witnessing this become truly absurd in our lifetimes. It’s one thing when journalists ask powerful people in decision-making positions whether they “believe in” Keynesian economics, Just War Theory, or God. These are areas where we must make decisions in the absence of verifiable facts. But our politicians get asked, straight-faced, whether they “believe in” global warming, vaccines, resource depletion, and the economic roots of war. That’s literally asking them whether they agree reality exists.

As I was writing this essay, I received news that several Nebraska state senators are petitioning for a special session to “debate” vaccine mandates. One senator, Dave Murman of District 32, claimed that “Despite what has been in the news lately, these particular vaccines have not been approved by the FDA.” Per the FDA’s own website, this is altogether false. Senator Murman, his vision circumscribed by beliefs, officially asserts something that goes against testable reality.

I recall scientists forecasting the disastrous consequences of global warming at least as far back as 1988. In my lifetime, the evidence has gotten only more robust and ironclad. Yet we remain paralyzed from action because some people refuse to “believe” the evidence presented by experts and analysts. They think facts stand waiting for approval. Meanwhile, our democracy, our health, and our planet continue rotting, because like gravity, these facts don’t care about official approval.

Further Thoughts on Community Arts

This post is a follow-up to In Praise of Community Arts

My promo photo from the
local community theatre

“Hey, Kevin,” Brad said, sticking his head in the door of my office. “I saw you in the show on Friday. I didn’t know you were an actor!”

“Thanks,” I said back with a smile, leaning back in my chair. “I thought you knew that was why I couldn’t have a beer that afternoon.”

“I guess I just didn’t put two and two together until I saw your name in the program. We go to the community theatre from time to time, but we usually don’t know anybody in the show.”

When I worked in the field, my coworkers often knew I was an amateur actor. They understood that I couldn’t stay late or pull overtime because I had a rehearsal or show tonight, and had people depending on me to be there. But they also never attended the show; they begged off, saying they couldn’t afford tickets (theatre is admittedly not cheap) or that they had family responsibilities. They knew I acted, they just never saw me do it.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was my first performance since I got promoted to office work earlier this year. It also marks the first time any co-workers have recognized me onstage. It makes me conscious of my own relationship with actors and performances. Somebody who knows me from work, knows that I frequently cuss, have a precarious relationship with deadlines, and put my feet on the desk while I think. How do they respond to me acting?

Dr. Djoymi Baker, professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, has written that actors who become associated with a particular role, become a sort of “intertext,” an external commentary upon their own work. She specifically cites actors from Star Trek appearing in non-franchise roles: Bill Shatner in Boston Legal, or George Takei and Nichelle Nichols in Heroes. On some level, Dr. Baker writes, actors never cease their most famous roles.

What happens, though, when an actor’s most famous “role” isn’t performance? In Our Town, our central characters, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, were played by a married couple, a dispatch operator for a local haulage company and his stay-at-home wife. Most actors are students or skilled professionals, including local doctors and technicians. As you’d expect, the local university is overrepresented, including both students and faculty.

Jeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey, and me as Clarence Odbody, in
Kearney Community Theatre's 2017 production of It's a Wonderful Life

Everyone involved in community theatre, both onstage and backstage, has another local profile. When a famous TV actor appears in a play or movie—when, say Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart appeared together in Hamlet—they carry other acting roles into their current position. But when we amateurs appear onstage, the roles we carry reflect our outside responsibilities: doctor, lawyer, student, carpenter.

Further, as anybody who’s ever done community theatre knows, the companies are often in-groupish and clubby. A small handful of participants generally get lead roles and artistic direction credits. They might become locally famous, but they never stop being, say, a highly respected philosophy professor or radiologist. (Let’s just say.) They always have this duality, this contrast between their daily selves and their current onstage performance.

Experience tells me this goes both ways. Almost four years ago, when I still worked in the field, my company had a frequently contentious relationship with a client, a local dentistry firm. The company and the client argued frequently, and lawyers got involved. Then, late in the contract, I got assigned to the job. Tensions diminished almost immediately as several members of the client group recognized me from a recent performance of It’s a Wonderful Life.

I’d become a genuine local celebrity.

The term parasocial relationship has become common in internet parlance when audiences have deep personal affinity for public figures—YouTube celebrities and Instagram “influencers,” for instance. But community arts brings this home. We have parasocial relationships with community actors and directors, local gallery artists, pub musicians. And we have literal social relationships with these people through their day jobs and community involvements.

We local celebrities (ahem) also become what Dr. Baker calls “intertexts.” Except, rather than commenting on other acting roles, we comment upon social roles: jobs, families, congregations, and spending habits. When Brad stuck his head into my office, he was speaking to Kevin Nenstiel, apprentice proposal writer. But he was also talking to Simon Stimson, the passionate but drunken choir director at Grovers Corners Congregational Church.

When people see me on stage, they see my character, but they also see me. They’re conscious that the events portrayed are scripted, controlled, directed. Yes, they’ve looked at me and seen Simon Stimson, Clarence Odbody, Captain Lesgate, or Nathan Radley. But they’ve also seen me, and because of that, they’ve seen themselves. The relationship is difficult, nuanced, and strange. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But by golly, I love learning about it.

In Praise of Community Arts

Cast photo from Kearney Community Theatre's production of Our Town.
That's me, center back, in the black porkpie hat. Photo by Judy Rozema.

I spent much of the Kearney Community Theatre’s recent production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town staring at David Rozema’s backside. Because the character I played, Simon Stimson, is dead throughout Act III, I spent the entire act frozen, head forward, doing all my acting from the neck up. While David, as the Stage Manager, explained the scene to the audience with choric ineluctability, I had literally nothing to see except his dark-suited back and posterior.

My family has a long history of getting involved in local and community-based arts. Moving around throughout my childhood as a military household, we never stayed in any one place long enough to put down roots. However, my family’s commitment to the arts always made them leaders, even if only temporarily. My parents would join the church choir, and a year later, would be directing it. I’d join church theatre; they’d be directing that, too.

Yet even as they took point in local (usually church-based) art, my parents gave me, let’s say, conflicting values. As important as song was in worship, for instance, they pooh-poohed the value of concerts. Why pay exorbitant prices and travel across town for somebody’s curtain time, they asked, when we already have the CD? Same for theatre: movies are cheaper and more convenient. And by “movies,” I mean we waited for the VHS to drop.

Thus I reached adulthood with lopsided information: I’d learned the rudiments of art, music, and theatre as actions, but remained blissfully unaware of processes. That is, I could act and write relatively well, and showed promise at drawing or painting, but I didn’t understand how skillful people with bure promise translated those skills into careers. A vast gulf existed in my head between practicing the pure skills, and getting that lucrative publishing or recording contract.

Don’t misunderstand me: my parents didn’t deliberately mislead me about art. As an adult, I realize that attending concerts, gallery shows, and theatre, involved the logistics of finding our way around cities that they didn’t know very well, because we moved so often. Because neighborhood congregations are small and intimate, there’s a level of personal closeness that one can’t match in a massive midtown proscenium. My folks did art, essentially, for their friends and neighbors.

Your humble blogger as Simon Stimson in Our Town. Photo by Corbey Dorsey.

I’ve long considered myself an introvert, given my preference for solitude, and my tendency to gather information before I speak. But recently, I’ve come to doubt that. My parents remember me as a gregarious child, quick-witted, eager to entertain others. Somewhere around third grade, though, I shifted. My clearest memory of third grade is getting discouraged trying to fit into my Cub Scout troop. I think that’s maybe about the age when I burned out.

The realization that I’m maybe not an introvert, but rather a discouraged extrovert, an affable team player who simply got tired of trying, explains why I’ve always joined community arts organizations. I’ve done theatre through churches, schools, and community theatre companies. Despite my limited musical ability, I’ve joined ensembles and given my best. Even my writing, the least intimate art since you’re seldom there when the audience reads it, was written to share with others.

The least productive times throughout my life have been when I’ve had no artistic outlet. When I can’t share with an audience, when I can’t have that creative intimacy with others, everything else in life suffers. My job tends to stagnate, I have difficulty building and sustaining relationships. Without art, and the exchange between performers and audience, I’m not me. Art remains the tool I use to feel close to others when other tools fail.

In Our Town, my character, Simon Stimson, is a self-hating drunk. The script says he’s had “a peck of trouble,” but doesn’t state why. To justify this, I played him as deeply closeted. Yet church music remains deeply valuable to him. He desperately wants to conduct a choir that the community can take pride in. Partway through rehearsals, I realized: like me, Simon feels fully human only when art lets him connect with his community.

Recent personal upheavals mean this might be the last time I perform with this company. I may have to relocate before year’s end. The relationships I’ve cultivated, not only with other amateur actors, but also with the audience, won’t travel with me; I’ll have to forge new ones somewhere. Yet looking back, I can say, no matter how tired community theatre often leaves me, no matter how discouraged, this is when I’ve felt most human.

Who Owns the Thoughts In Your Head?

Tucker Carlson, corporate puppet

In a week notable for explosive media revelations, corporate meltdowns, and weirdness, yesterday’s news about One America News Network (OANN) stood out. Disclosure by Reuters shows that OANN receives about 90% of its operating revenue through AT&T and its subsidiaries grabbed me violently. Yes, that same AT&T, which owns WarnerMedia, home of Ted Turner’s CNN, and also HBO, which broadcasts Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

I can’t stress this enough: this means one umbrella corporation has investments in America’s Conservative, Centrist, and Left-wing media operations. While OANN has cultivated explicit fondness for Donald Trump and conservative nationalism, Oliver has become so influential in leftist circles that observers have described the John Oliver effect. CNN, meanwhile leans incrementally left, but attempts to maintain the traditional illusion of centrist neutrality.

Exactly where each broadcaster leans, however, matters little overall, if they’re beholden to the same corporations. Though AT&T doesn’t own OANN directly, OANN’s dependence on service providers in which Ma Bell owns a controlling interest, means that AT&T functionally owns responsibility for the network. And the same parent corporation has demonstrated it will sell audiences whatever pre-sliced bologna will line their pockets. Fundamentally, the corporation doesn’t care.

In today’s media-saturated environment, most audiences have liberty to select the news source they consider most reliable. This means networks actively court audiences by offering them viewpoints audiences consider trustworthy—which, usually, means selling viewers their own opinions, slightly polished. Telling audiences what they already believe has proven to be a lucrative business model. The creation of mass media conglomerates has made moral backbone optional.

John Oliver, corporate puppet

Most citizens lack resources necessary to find news without a corporate gatekeeper. The accumulation of news sources under owners like William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch, has meant that we depend on owners’ probity to maintain our information. But both Hearst and Murdoch have proven their probity, um, lacking. Both have long histories of massaging publicly available information to suit their preferred outcomes.

Nor is the problem limited to news.

I remember learning some years ago that somebody owns the Bible. Sort of. Though the best-selling English translation is still the King James (Authorized) Version, which is in public domain, the best-selling translation in contemporary English is the New International Version. And that translation, being a specific arrangement of words, is still under copyright. The NIV Bible belongs to Zondervan, which draws royalties on major text citations and reprints.

Fair enough, but who owns Zondervan? Though founded independently in a farmhouse, Zondervan is currently a subsidiary of HarperCollins, itself a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. HarperCollins also owns Avon, publisher of Anton Szandor LeVay’s Satanic Bible. The same company sells both sides of the fence. Rejecting religion doesn’t solve the problem; many of public atheist Richard Dawkins’ books are published by Houghton Mifflin, a subsidiary of… HarperCollins.

The corporations we ordinary people depend upon to disseminate morality, democracy, and knowledge, have their fingers in the opposite pie. Though it’s hypothetically possible that these corporations maintain boundaries between their divisions, we essentially have to trust the parent companies that they’ve achieved this. And they haven’t proven themselves wholly trustworthy when they make promises about internal mechanisms.

Rachel Maddow, corporate puppet

One could continue. Two corporations, Molson Coors and AnheuserBusch InBev, control ninety percent of America’s beer production. This includes such putative competitors as Leinenkugel, Shock Top, and Elysian. Though microbrews appear periodically—just like micropublishers and micronewspapers—it doesn’t take long before market forces, high overhead, and a closed market persuade many to sell out or fold. These are just examples; check sources on your favored industry to find more.

The companies that provide the news, religion, and beer we prefer, also probably market the news, religion, and beer we despise. No individual can possible comb the registers to find the connections, and when shopping, no individual brain can recollect the incestuous networks that control our choices. Overwhelmed and under-informed, we resort to the classic fallback position favored by customers throughout history: buying whatever’s convenient, even if it’s openly toxic.

Collective action seems necessary, but I can’t envision what that looks like. We can’t trust the government to regulate this inbred sludge, since the sludge manufacturers bankroll our politicians. It’s tempting to plead for revolution. But considering how Communism collapsed quickly into Stalinism and Maoism, that option becomes equally unappealing. When the state nationalizes the Inbred Sludge Industry, it becomes invested in making more inbred sludge.

Yet I fear the consequences of surrendering to fatalism. What solutions remain? I’ve run out of ideas.

Then God Said: Let There Be Words

E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien, Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

The Bible wasn’t written for Americans. Nor was it written recently, by somebody speaking English and sharing our theological values. Most Christians probably know this, if not consciously, then implicitly: the world described in Holy Writ is distant in space and time. What, though, does this mean? When we Westerners, especially White Americans, find values and standards in the Bible, how does our cultural background change what we’ve read?

Professors “Randy” Richards and Brandon O’Brien have experience communicating ancient Near Eastern cultural standards to American divinity students. They propose, in this book, to offer a synoptic introduction to cross-cultural reading. They accomplish this purpose well enough for general audiences, though they arguably sometimes miss their own presuppositions. It’s necessary to read them with the same questioning eye that they turn to reading the Scriptures.

From the introduction, our authors emphasize one question: “what goes without saying?” Anybody who has ever studied linguistics, or even learned a second language, knows that cultures are built of metaphors, prior assumptions, and shared beliefs. This applies to America, and also to Biblical Israel. And the Biblical authors wrote for an audience that didn’t share our culture. Therefore our authors ask what, in each moment, goes without saying?

This question has no single answer. They start with obvious components: Israelite customs weren’t like American customs. They had different, but no less potent, views on race and ethnicity than us. They had perceptions of time based on working in the fields, not factories. As the book progresses, our authors’ examinations of Biblical culture become increasingly minute, focusing on, say, individualism vs. collectivism, or guilt vs. shame.

Our authors make a robust effort to explain the distinctions, which aren’t obvious. It’s difficult to explain cultural divides when the words used to explain them are cultural. What, for example, did “grace” and “faith,” two of Christianity’s most important words, mean in New Testament Israel? Richards and O’Brien struggle to explain, drawing metaphors from Coppola’s Godfather movies as metaphors to explain the duties and responsibilities these concepts involve.

Here’s where problems start creeping in. Because these differences are so vast, and define culture in such sweeping ways, they’re difficult to examine directly. Our authors often address these questions indirectly, through anecdote or analogy. Even the authors admit these tools are imprecise, and require judicious application. But elsewhere in the book, they acknowledge the desire for precision is one of modern Western culture’s unspoken presuppositions.

E. Randolph Richards (left) and Brandon J. O'Brien

Prior reviewers, for instance, have noted that Professor Richards draws numerous analogies from his time teaching Christian seminarians in Indonesia. He frequently uses Indonesian tribal culture as stand-ins for how he imagines Biblical Galilean culture might’ve functioned. He never proves this comparison, though. Richards, at times, dances perilously close to perceiving “non-Western culture” as monolithic and global, and worse, unchanged by the intervening millennia. The problems they describe are circular.

Though I don’t completely buy this criticism, I see why harsher reviewers consider it persuasive. In describing racism in the Bible, for instance, it’s worth noting that “race” means something different in Bronze Age Judea than in modern America (see, for instance, Dr. Ibram Kendi, a race scholar whose positions emerge from his Christian upbringing). Therefore our authors’ comparisons will always be approximate, more like poetry than science.

Please don’t misunderstand me: this reflects the critics more than it reflects our authors. Richards and O’Brien specify early that the questions they seek to answer, are woven so deeply into the respective cultures, that they require some poetic license. Unfortunately, because linguistic precision is a Western cultural value (which the authors describe), some people will never accept metaphor and poetry. Richards and O’Brien can’t fix that.

I understand why some readers have problems. Remember, in high school English class, our teachers asking “What is the poet trying to say here?” That’s the problem we face, a presumption that language is a skeleton key. Richards and O’Brien need to use language to explain why language is subjective and imprecise; they never had hope of reconciling this gap. Maybe, arguably, it’s a flaw in their book’s very premise.

If readers can suspend Western expectations and think poetically, this book offers much-needed insights into what Biblical words meant to the audiences who first read them. The authors admit their list isn’t comprehensive, and entire libraries have been written on that theme. But as an introductory course for generalists and seminarians, this book has the potential to be a step in the right direction. If you can read it correctly.